By: Angel Steiner
Larry Tope was a 17 year old living the teenage life in the rural village of Paulding in 1970. His parents, Lowell and Margaret Tope, owned a local hardware store Downtown Paulding spending their days assisting village residents with all their hardware needs. They would look out their front windows of the store and admire the old Grand Theatre and reminisce about days gone by. The Tope’s, together with Bill Straley and Gary Wobler, decided to resurrect the whimsy of the old theatre for the village of Paulding.
The summer of 1970 Larry remembers spending days with Ken McMichael and David Straley (among others) taking apart the seating to get them reupholstered to their former glory (there were over 500 seats in the Theatre!). They repainted, put on a new roof and purchased a new screen for the projectors. The first movie shown in the new Paulding Theatre was Disney’s “Apple Dumpling Gang”. Larry remembers the line to get in and see this film was all the way down the sidewalk to the main intersection of Paulding!
A Mr. Haney ran the projectors, he was the original projectionist when the theater opened in the 40s. He ran the 2 projectors seamlessly, he was the expert. Later on, Paul Ludwig took over this position at the theatre. The theatre was state of the art with two projectors, they used a broker in Cleveland to get the latest flick. Depending on the film, royalties would be anywhere from 50-70-90 cents per ticket, and Larry remembers that a ticket in those days was only 50 cents! So, it makes sense that concession prices had to balance any losses from the royalties of the film.
Larry remembers there was a spiral staircase that led up to a second story office that had a small screen and speaker to watch while doing other office work. Lowell also was the master of the boiler as that was a previous profession of his, especially his time spent serving in the US Military.
Concessions were run by the local young people of the area — Dorothy Dix, Sue Vance, the Kauser twins (just to name a few) — along with Larry when he was available in between school obligations. Cleaning up the fallen popcorn and discarded cups and candy boxes after the picture was John Miller.
Paulding Theatre was managed and operated by the Topes from early 1970 through about 1984. Sometime in there, Mr. Wobler and Mr. Straley were ready to move on, so the Tope’s bought out their share of the business so they could do just that. As the 80s dawned on the Tope family, Lowell and Margaret were empty nesters and decided to start downsizing in life. They sold the theatre to Larry Gorrell at that time, and he used it for a number of years as an auction house. Some years later, Gorrell then sold it to the Vogels who owned the local bar down the street. They had hopes of turning the Paulding Theatre into a night club. And there she sat, and sat… waiting for the dreams of grandeur of the good old days to be revived again. Tales of people showing up to purchase some popcorn or other concession goodies even though they weren’t planning to watch the latest showing along with other stories about walking the gangway on the second story to reach light bulbs when they needed changed (that was Lowell’s job) will now be archived in the memories of all closely associated with Paulding Theatre.
